Beer Writing Awards Announced
The North American Guild of Beer Writers announced awards in 14 categories this afternoon for excellence in writing. Despite the name, it’s an international competition and writers from the UK, South Africa, Canada, and Belgium all took home awards. I’ll break down some of the results below, but first, I gotta break the big news.
For the first time, Beervana took gold in the Best Blog category!
For those who have followed along, the site has gotten frustratingly close in the past, finishing number two from 2017-2019. Last year it fell off the list completely. It was very satisfying to finally win, despite the fact that the blog category is a strange remnant from a pre-Instagram time. For practitioners of the ancient* art, it means a lot.
The list of 42 winners tells us a lot. Five years ago, nearly every winner in the article categories (that is, not a blog, book, or podcast) published their pieces in corporeal, dead-tree magazines and newspapers. Good Beer Hunting was already a pretty big deal, but writers for the online site took home exactly one award. This year the situation was reversed: print pubs won just two awards, while GBH killed, winning 19 of the 33 article awards.
The people winning the awards are changing as well. Five years ago, just 7.5% of the winners were women and one was a person of color. This year, 31% of the winners were women, and Kate Bernot and Beth Demmon were multiple winners. In 2021, three winners were people of color.
Finally, if you’re building a fantasy writing team, look for Irish expats living in Belgium. The dynamic duo of Eoghan Walsh and Breandán Kearney took eight (!) awards, including five outright wins. That means Belgo-Irish writers won over a third of the competitions’s gold medals. Time for an Orval—or Guinness—in celebration. It’s their world and we just lease apartments.
I can’t wrap this up without a bit of horn-blowing. In addition to the blog category, I took first and second in the technical writing category for my Sightglass articles on yeast and hops. The blog has never won an award in an article category—well, never a first, anyway. I have no editors, interns, or researchers around here (not that anyone does), so that means an awful lot.
Thanks to the judges and a hearty cheers to all the winners!
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* In Internet time, twenty years counts as ancient.